Bellagrand: A Novel (50 page)

“Too far from what? It’s not even as far as Barrington.”

“You don’t go to Barrington.” He hadn’t been there once since they moved to Boston.

“It’s not even as far as Lawrence,” he said.

She hadn’t been there once since they moved to Boston.

“I’ll take the car,” he said. “It won’t be bad. I won’t be gone long. I’ll try not to have too many seminars at night.”

“
Too
many? How about none? And Harry, we don’t have a car.”

He smiled broadly. “We’ll have to buy one then, won’t we?”

Harry applied to Tufts and was accepted. His probation was ending in early 1924, a year early. Harry was glad. He had no relationship with Ken Femmer, an elderly gentleman forty years on the job. He often talked about how much he missed Margaret Janke.

“Because that’s what you want,” Gina said. “Avid rapport with the guards who watch over you.” But what she was really thinking was: the only thing Harry said he missed about the Florida life was Margaret Janke.

They bought a fancy car, a powerful and expensive black Mercedes. They had to rent a space for it, because Boston was now so full of cars that there was nowhere to park on the streets. They found a carriage house, where, barely twenty years earlier, wealthy Bostonians had kept their horses.

Two

BOSTON IS A REMARKABLE CITY
. Gina was always exceptionally fond of it. Being in a city—with shops and pavements and parks and people—made for a different daily existence than seeing nothing but water and sky every day, palms and frogs, mangroves and moss oaks, leisure boats, orchids. Not better. Different.

In Boston she enjoyed dressing up her family in their finery and walking through the Public Garden on Sunday afternoons when everyone was out with their children and parasols, smiling, nodding, chatting amiably with one another. The vendors sold ice cream and drinks on Charles Street, and the Park Avenue Hotel served a delicious Sunday brunch. Gina almost didn’t miss Emilio and his comparatively pedestrian preparations. Alexander would run ahead of them, and she and Harry would walk arm in arm, Harry tipping his hat every five minutes, Gina nodding and smiling.

“We are so well trained,” Harry said.

“Like puppets,” said Gina. “Tip, nod, smile, move onward, tip, nod, smile.”

“And yell—Alexander, not too far!”

“Alexander, not too far!”

Tip, nod, smile.

The one thing they couldn’t find common ground on was what church service to attend. In Tequesta, it had been all about the Catholics, and Harry, in any case, wasn’t allowed to leave the house even for weekly worship. So it didn’t matter what Harry wanted, because every Sunday Gina took Alexander with Fernando and a frequently hungover, yet repentant Salvo to St. Domingo Ibanez. But in Boston, the only Catholic church Gina wanted to attend was St. Leonard’s in the North End, and Harry had no interest in going there. If he would attend anything, he said, it would be the Congregational Park Avenue Church. Gina tried attending it. Once. But everything in the service, from the beginning to the non-Eucharist end, was alien to her. “Why don’t they read ‘Our Father’?” she asked Harry as they were leaving.

“I don’t know.”

“Seems odd not to read the Lord’s Prayer.”

“I don’t know why they don’t.”

“Yes, you said. But why wasn’t there a Eucharist?”

“They don’t do that.”

“But why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you said.”

So every Sunday, Harry would stay home and catch up on his work, and Gina would take Alexander to St. Leonard’s.

Sometimes Esther would come to Beacon Hill on Sunday afternoons to have dinner with them. She was polite, complimented Gina on the house, the furniture, ate like a bird, but ate whatever Italian preparation Gina put in front of her and praised it, played with Alexander, took him to the park, talked to her brother, and then made her leave before Alexander’s bedtime. Civilized and casual. Gina and Harry didn’t once go up to Barrington to have dinner at Harry’s father’s house that now belonged to Esther.

Gina asked Harry why they didn’t go, and at first he said that Esther’s coming to them was more convenient, which Gina couldn’t argue with, but which also didn’t answer her question. When prodded, Harry admitted he no longer felt comfortable in Barrington. So she stopped prodding, and they never went. Every other Friday afternoon, Esther would have Clarence drive her down to Boston, and they would pick up Alexander and take him back to Barrington for the weekend.

This allowed Gina and Harry to spend time alone, to get dressed up and go dancing, to listen to jazz, to go to dinner at their new friends’ houses. The dancing was enjoyable, more so than the dinners, which Gina would find burdensome, though she couldn’t pinpoint why. In anticipation of the evenings, she would go shopping on Newbury Street, where she would buy beautiful dresses, silk skirts, suede shoes, crepe hats, white gloves. She had her curly, unruly, slightly graying hair colored and styled. Dressed in smart evening garb, off she and Harry would trot, perhaps to Meredith and Edward’s, or to dine with Barnaby, who had just lost his wife to an undisclosed illness and sorely needed some companionship, or to the home of William and Nancy, a fetching young couple, who lived in a house overlooking the Boston Common on Beacon Street, where kings and ambassadors had lived. Gina enjoyed walking downhill to them, though she liked the slog back uphill at the end of the night somewhat less.

But this was the thing: the gatherings and dinners inside the plush and well-appointed homes were less successful in reality than in her mental renditions. The problem was Harry. He would act like such a stick-in-the-mud. While everyone else would buzz with talk about libraries and parks and fall fairs, about industry and economy and politics and the stock market, about who and how much and where and what was good and why and what was going to be good in two months, Harry would sit and palm his glass of wine. When he was asked by the men at the table what he thought of the rising value of real estate, the farm prices, the factory overproduction, Harding’s sudden death, Coolidge’s ascension, or the civil war in Russia, he would mumble—literally mumble—some nonresponse and turn the subject around to the questioner. He did not argue, did not object, did not engage. He was no longer the objection maker; he was the furniture. His doltish lack of participation would occasionally prick Gina into a squall of an unwanted argument instead of half-sober love at the end of an evening.

“Most couples have jealous fights after a night of drinking,” Harry said late one evening as they were climbing, panting, up steep Charles Street and Gina was goading him to bicker with her. “Not us.”

“I’m not fighting, Harry. I’m striving for understanding.”

“Are you? What’s not to understand? I’m not interested in the things they talk about. I have no opinion.”

“But, darling, tonight Edward, instead of his usual savannah harangues, brought up the recent Scopes trial and William Jennings Bryan. You love this subject.”

“Hardly love. It piqued my interest for five minutes when Scopes was first arrested.”

“You were thinking of reading a seminar on it. And yet you said nothing.”

“Tonight I had nothing to say about it. Bryan and Darrow went at it in court, like the mortal enemies that they were. It’s what we were all expecting. Bryan gave it his all and died of a brain hemorrhage five days later. Darrow’s fine oratorical skills weren’t enough. Scopes was convicted in a kangaroo court despite them. Fined one hundred dollars. What’s to discuss?”

“You could’ve said all
that
.”

“What’s the point? They think Darrow is a hero.”

“I thought you liked persuading those who disagree with you to come around to your opinion?”

“I no longer care what anyone thinks or believes.”

That was it. There was a supercilious whiff to his dismissal of friendly conversation with others. It was as if he deemed them to be little more than ants arguing.

“Last week Meredith brought up the Teapot Dome scandal,” Gina said, “and I know how fond you are of discussing bribery and conspiracy in high places at oil companies.”

“Not last week,” said Harry, “and not with a woman. What am I going to do? Argue with a woman in her own home at a dinner she had her kindly cook prepare for me? That is not what I do, Gina.”

“I understand. But Barnaby, who so wants to be your friend, was desperately trying to drag you into a discussion about Chrysler’s new fifteen-hundred-dollar car, which you said you might want, and the reduced working hours at U.S. Steel, and you—”

“And I refused to be dragged in?” Harry nodded. “I’m not interested. I’m studying unrelated things at Tufts. My dissertation is on Thermopylae.”

“I know.” She paused. She had something to say about that, too. “That’s not unrelated. It’s metaphorically significant.”

“Only to you. I’m interested in the actual history.”

“How is that going by the way?” It seemed as if he had spent years on the dissertation, and it still wasn’t done.

“It’s coming along.” He shrugged it off. “Admittedly slowly. I’m trying to get it right. The subject is complex. Did I tell you the amazing thing the Greek king Leonidas said to Xerxes at the hot gates to the pass when the Persian demanded the surrender of Sparta’s weapons?”

“You told me,” Gina said. “Leonidas said,
Come and take them
.”

“Isn’t that incredible?”

“You know what’s incredible?” She was irritated and out of breath. “That a man who spent twenty years of his life advocating and demonstrating against military action of any kind, even going to prison for his beliefs, Wilson’s whitest dove if you will, would write his doctoral paper on the bloodiest, most brutal battle of them all.”

“I am interested in many things, Gina,” Harry said. There was that loftiness again. “Why does that surprise you?”

“Yes, many things. Not Clarence Darrow, or Chrysler, or even Theodore Dreiser.”

“Other things.”

Was it her imagination or had Harry become disengaged from their daily life? He was studying so much at home and at the Athenaeum, reading, writing, muttering under his breath, driving to and from Tufts, busy, busy, busy with everything but her.
The scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion.

Who said that? Was it that wisecracker Oscar Wilde again?

They stopped speaking as they climbed their way to Mt. Vernon.

Yes, Boston is a marvelous town. Everything a town should have, Boston has in abundance. It’s a walking town, which means it’s intimate, despite being large. It’s technologically advanced. It’s aesthetically beautiful. It sits on a mighty ocean and perches on the banks of a winding, not too wide river. It has universities and libraries and parks. It has shopping and nightlife, restaurants and opera. It is populated with beautiful, bountiful people, people who are sensible and polite, well dressed and well mannered.

There is no other city Gina would rather live in. And she lives in the most beautiful part of Boston, perched on a hill overlooking a park and the city skyline. The salty smells of the nearby ocean fly in on the wings of breezes. What could be better? She dresses elegantly, like a lady, and everyone sees it. Her son is stunning, and everyone sees that, and admires
her
for having a boy such as he. What a successful mother, what an accomplished woman she must be to have a tall, handsome, well-behaved boy. Alexander’s greatness is Gina’s reflected glory.

Her husband is bookish, scholarly, erudite, and amiable (mostly), studying (and studying and studying) to be a doctor of letters, so he can become that most respected of things, a professor. After all those years of toiling for pennies, she doesn’t have to work. What a blessing. She joins a reading club, a parents’ club, a park conservatory committee. She becomes a charter member of the Daughters of Boston, fundraising for all the right causes. She volunteers at the Boston Library on Copley Square. She buys a sewing machine and makes dresses and skirts, which she donates to the local branch of St. Vincent’s. She volunteers at St. Vincent’s. As before, in Lawrence, working at St. Vincent’s eventually starts to overwhelm the hours of her day, because there is so much to be done. But she manages. She takes Alexander with her everywhere. They are rarely apart, except when he is at school or when Harry plays soccer with him at the park.

Alexander hasn’t suffered as she had feared. He has blossomed. He loves his weekends with his aunty; he has made friends in Barrington—a boy named Teddy, a girl named Belinda. Esther jokes that she has trouble calling him in for tea because the three of them are always out in the yard, in the woods, by the creek. Esther’s laughing face sometimes clouds at that point, as if she wants to add
like Harry and Ben
to that sentence, but of course doesn’t, and Harry is long gone anyway, in another room.

Gina reads and cooks and shops and cleans. When Alexander is old enough to attend kindergarten, she busies herself until the hours have passed and it’s time to go get him. When he starts grade school at Park Street Kids on Brimmer Street, she walks him there each morning, hand in hand, and then busies herself until it is time to pick him up again. She dedicates herself to the full-time tasks of household maintenance and child-rearing, to being a good and loving wife. If someone asked her to describe herself, Gina, without pause, would say, I am Jane Barrington, and I am Alexander’s mother.

But she is also Harry’s wife.

The Russian civil war over, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics named, Lenin dead of cerebral hemorrhage,
The Great Gatsby
all the rage.

Alexander four, five, six, rifles out of sticks, frogs as bombs, cannons not soccer balls. Everything he holds in his hands he makes into a weapon.

1923, 1924, 1925. Like seconds, the years tick tock by.

Why would Isadora Duncan’s words come back to haunt her at the oddest times? Why would Gina remember that peculiar woman, a sensualist who lost her children to a tragedy, who danced with abandon through Boston on her last tour of the United States, who married Sergei Esenin, a Russian poet eighteen years her junior, who left her and then hanged himself? “Life is not real here!”